Super Mario 64 for the PS1

Are there any pictures or video of it running? I understand why they are not on the GitHub page

here's another video that showed good gameplay shots that I happened to see last night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kscCFfXecTI

The distorted textures and weird triangle clipping issues are exactly what you'd expect from an unoptimized port to a platform that doesn't support perspective correct texturing or depth testing.

It looks pretty decent but seeing the texture warping and glitching reminds me of why I was team N64

The N64 definitely has the nicer GPU of the two. An N64 with a CD-ROM drive would have been amazing.

And a bit more texture memory!

The whole thing about the texture cache being the worst design decision in the N64 just gets parroted so much, but nobody can cogently explain which corner should have been cut instead to fit the budget.

The N64's CPU, with pretty much every single game released on the platform, is just sitting there idling along at maybe 30% load tops, and usually less than that. It's a 64 bit CPU, but Nintendo's official SDK doesn't even support doubles or uint64!

Of course, Nintendo clearly cared about the CPU a lot for marketing purposes (it's in the console's name), but from a purely technological perspective, it is wasteful. Most of the actual compute is done on the RSP anyway. So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.

It should be noted, though, that the N64 was designed with multitexturing capabilities, which would have helped with the mushy colors had games actually taken advantage of it (but they didn't, which here again, the Nintendo SDK is to blame for).

> So, getting a much smaller CPU would have been a big corner to cut, that could have saved enough resources to increase the texture cache to a useful resolution like 128x128 or so.

How? The texture RAM (TMEM) is in the RSP, not in the CPU.

How is that relevant? "Resources" really just means money, which can be allocated between different items on the BoM at-will. The N64's chips are all (more or less) bespoke, so the functionality of each individual part is completely under Nintendo's control. Spend less on the CPU, and you suddenly have money left to spend on the RSP. (And on the RDP, which contains the TMEM -- it lives on the same chip as the RSP, but is a distinct thing. I assume you know this, but just to add to the discussion for readers - the RSP is the N64's SIMD coprocessing unit, which most games use to perform vertex shading, whereas the RDP is the actual rasterization and texturing hardware.)